The invention relates to electronic devices, and more particularly to wireless communication.
Demand for wireless information services via cell phones personal digital assistants (PDAs), and Internet appliances (IA) plus wireless networking among notebook computers is rapidly growing. Various protocols for wireless communication have been proposed, including the 802.11 standards for wireless networking at high data rates (e.g., 20 Mbps). In particular, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has been suggested for the 802.11 wireless local area network 5 GHz band standard. For transmission, OFDM essentially splits a data stream into N parallel substreams with each substream on its own subcarrier (frequency division multiplexing). The subcarriers are taken to be initially orthogonal by frequency selection. Thus the subcarriers may overlap spectrally because the orthogonality allows a receiver to separate them. But channel dispersion disrupts the orthogonality.
OFDM with pilot symbols aided schemes help overcome the sensitivity to frequency offsets between a transmitter and receiver oscillators and Doppler effects. Garcia et al, Joint 2D-Pilot-Symbol-Assisted-Modulation and Decision-Directed Frequency Synchronization Schemes for Coherent OFDM, IEEE . . . 2961 (2000).
Lee et al, Antenna Diversity for an OFDM System in a Fading Channel, IEEE Military Comm. Conf. Proc. (MILCOM) 1104 (1999) considers multiple receiver antennas and applies various combining methods for receiving OFDM transmissions.